Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Good-for-Nothing Girl Marches On

Megumi Igarashi shows some of her art at a news conference in Tokyo last Thursday after the Tokyo High Court upheld an obscenity verdict against her. | YOSHIAKI MIURA

Artist Megumi Igarashi had never imagined battling
investigative authorities over freedom of expression until they claimed
she had committed crimes with her works of art.

Igarashi, known by her pseudonym Rokudenashiko, which literally means
“good-for-nothing girl,” is noted for vagina-themed art, including
“Vagina Boat,” a fully functional kayak. She used enhanced 3-D scan data
of her own vagina to design it.

On July 12, 2014, the artist was spending a typical day at home until
police suddenly showed up to arrest her over an art project that they
claimed was “obscene.” It was just two months after she had held her
first solo exhibition.

Megumi Igarashi paddles a kayak in October 2013 designed in the shape of her vagina. | AFP-JIJIIgarashi, now 45, was arrested for allegedly distributing online 3-D
scanned data of her vagina to the crowdfunding donors who had helped her
complete the “Vagina Boat” project.

She was arrested again the same year for exhibiting three of her
“Deco-man” works, a series of sculptures of her vagina in various
eccentric designs, including a remote-controlled vagina car and a vagina
smartphone case, in an adult entertainment shop in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo
in July 2014.

Since then, Igarashi has been fighting the obscenity charges in court
while stressing that “artists should be more serious” about art
censorship.

Last Thursday, the Tokyo High Court upheld a lower court decision
that found her guilty of obscenity for distributing the 3-D data and
ordered her to pay a ¥400,000 fine. The high court also agreed with the
lower court that the “Deco-man” sculptures were not obscene because they
did not sexually stimulate viewers.

Artist Megumi Igarashi, known as Rokudenashiko (Good-For-Nothing Girl), holds up a sign in front of the Tokyo High Court last Thursday showing the court's decision finding her guilty of obscenity for distributing 3-D scans of her genitalia. | DAISUKE KIKUCHI

The artist immediately filed an appeal, saying she was “completely dissatisfied” with the high court ruling.

“It’s wrong for the government to judge what is art and what is not,”
Igarashi said in a recent interview with The Japan Times, stressing
that distribution of the 3-D data was part of her art project.

Knowing they face the potential of arrest, artists are inclined to censor their own work, she said.

While the court ruled that Igarashi distributed the data to raise
funds, her lawyer, Takashi Yamaguchi, told the press last week that the
court should acknowledge that the distribution was “part of the ‘Vagina
Boat’ project” and therefore it was art.

“When illustrating the human body, including my own body, it’s very
unnatural to blur or leave out that part (the genitals), or to consider
that it doesn’t exist,” Igarashi said.

Originally a comic book writer, Igarashi’s first vagina art was for a
manga in which she wrote about her own experience with cosmetic surgery
on her genitalia.

Dreaming of becoming a pioneering author specializing on the vagina,
believing there were no precursors, she also started working on the
“Deco-man” sculptures, which brought her notice as an artist.

After seeing people surprised or angered by her work, she said she
took the vagina concept more seriously, intending to change the common
perception of the organ as something sexual and obscene.For example, she claimed that a TV program had restricted her from saying out loud the title “Deco-man” because man is an abbreviated form of manko, Japanese slang for vagina. The word is often considered taboo by broadcasters and other media platforms.

“Manko and vagina have been such a taboo in Japanese society. Penis,
on the other hand, has been used in illustrations and has become a part
of pop culture,” Igarashi wrote on her website in English.

She stresses that her artworks are not obscene. Rather, describing
herself as a feminist, she wants her art to be fun and entertaining so
more people will understand that female genitalia are nothing to get
worked up about.

“Humor has the power to overcome entrenched concepts. I’d like to
keep on expressing in a fun and happy way, while using my body” to
design artworks, she said.

It is not rare for investigative authorities in Japan to crack down on art exhibitions or to attack certain art as obscene.

In 2014, police asked the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art to remove
works by photographer Ryudai Takano from a group exhibit titled “State
of the Medium.”

The photographs were of him posing naked with male and female models.

The police judged that 12 of the 50 works in the show, which featured
works by multiple photographers, were obscene due to their unaltered
display of male genitals. Museum staff were threatened with arrest if
they refused to act, museum official Fumiko Nakamura previously told The
Japan Times.

“In any case, one thing is clear: The government is asserting its
presence forcefully through the exercise of such power,” Takano wrote on
his blog soon after the incident. “If the government deviates from its
stated purpose, i.e. to temporarily borrow authority from its citizens,
and instead makes a display of this power, that act is far more
grotesque than something like the display of genitalia.”

The photographer and the museum decided to keep the works displayed —
with a cloth veil draped over the parts of the photos considered by the
police as obscene.

More famously, Takashi Asai, the president of Uplink Co., a company
that distributes films, runs theaters and publishes art books, was
embroiled in a legal saga that stretched from 1999 to 2008 over
“Mapplethorpe,” a collection of 260 black-and-white photographs by the
U.S. photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Asai’s company had published the Japanese edition of the book in
1994, which is included in the collection at the National Diet Library.

However, in 1999, when Asai returned from a business trip to the
United States and Canada with a copy of the Japanese edition of
“Mapplethorpe,” customs officials at Narita International Airport deemed
parts of it obscene and prevented him from bringing the book into the
country — even though it had already been on sale in Japan for years.

Asai filed complaints with the customs authorities twice. These were
not accepted and Asai eventually filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District
Court. In 2008, the Supreme Court found Asai not guilty.Asked about Igarashi’s trial and the high court ruling, Asai said he
thinks she’s innocent and that she and her lawyers are correct in saying
that the distribution of the 3-D data should be considered part of the
“Vagina Boat” project.

Asai referred to the works of Bulgaria-born environmental artist
Christo, known for his works of draping architecture, including the
Reichstag in Berlin, with giant cloth.

He argues that the blueprints illustrated by the artist are
considered part of his work, and thus Igarashi’s 3-D data should
likewise be considered part of the “Vagina Boat” project.

“If the police are saying that it’s 3-D data of female genitalia, the
lawyers should argue that the data were necessary to create a part of
an artwork called ‘Vagina Boat,’ ” Asai said.

“Rather than arguing if (the 3-D data) is art or something obscene, they should rather debate if it’s art or not,” he said.

“Vagina Boat” is currently being exhibited in the German Hygiene
Museum, alongside cultural-historical exhibits and works of other
contemporary artists, including Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

With her book “What Is Obscenity: The Story of a Good for Nothing
Artist and Her Pussy” nominated for this year’s L. A. Times Book Prize,
Igarashi says she is recognized as an artist overseas but in Japan she
is often disliked even by other artists.

However, although now living in Ireland with her child and her
husband, Mike Scott, the frontman for the rock band Waterboys, Igarashi
said she would like to continue exhibiting her works in Japan and hopes
to win an acquittal by the Supreme Court.

“The more this trial is talked about, the more chances it brings
about for people to realize that common sense and stereotypes are not
always correct,” she said.

“Little by little … I’m starting to gain support from people” in Japan.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.